Month: February 2015

“Rely on the teaching, not on the person;
Rely on the meaning, not on the words;
Rely on the definitive meaning, not on the provisional;
Rely on your wisdom mind, not on your ordinary mind.”
Buddha

Now with a model of reasoning under our belts we can turn our attention to using it.

The program for using it is going to be multifaceted, a collection of intellectual chores taken up not for gaining academic tenure or impressing our friends but because we really want to know, to the best that we can, just what it is to be alive in this universe that appears to us. We have a certain faith that asking the right questions can itself teach us something about paying attention, being awake to the wonder of everything, and even how we might live the good life as philosophers have long recommended.

The point is to overcome suffering. This path is soteriological. The Buddha taught that there is an end to suffering, nirvana exists. The teaching is that we suffer because we are confused; we do not see reality as it is. So we train in seeing the universe as the Buddha sees it, we train in what is called the view.

The crux of sharpening the experience of contemplation is a knack you can learn. It is an ability to entertain some way-out thoughts. Following a set of premises to their conclusions can uncover a universe not at all like the one that presents itself to us day after day. If we trust our reason (and what other choice do we have?) it penetrates another layer of understanding. All this is well known. Biologists teach us all plants and animals are constructed from cells which are intricate almost beyond belief, biochemically vast and complex. Yet only the eye of reason is able to picture the living world this way. It is very interesting, is it not, that in a sense it can be said that this cellular vision is more “real” then the picture we receive as our cognitive default, namely that all living things are separate individuals?

This is why it takes effort to train the mind in what is called the view. It takes some mental exercise to overcome the cognitive default that believes the root of a tree, the brain of a worm and the life of a man have almost nothing in common.

Where the university student will memorize facts and pass tests about cells and a documentary film maker might find the cell a perfect subject for their film, the contemplative takes the same material and works on it in their own way. The contemplative goal is not to pass a test nor create a work of art, though what they are after is a bit of both. The contemplative is training in opening the eye of wisdom. In this example the inner apprehension of what it really means that all living things share the same fundamental biological building block, the same fundamental chemical and structural similarities. Then perhaps training in what it really means that the body, that feels so intimately one’s own, consists of trillions and trillions of these miniature galaxies of intelligence, these vibrating drops of awareness. The contemplative turns an artistic eye on scientific content and heals the split between reality and imagination in an alchemical marriage.

I think this is a valid first way to try and explain the way of meditation for we moderns.

I hope to illustrate how the application of reasoning to ultimate questions leads to radical conclusions. These conclusions or insights are difficult to fully experience in all their ramifications, so meditation is used as a tool by which we are able to become familiar with them. We train in seeing the truths of the world as we understand it really is.

It is easy to see how this might work by considering quantum mechanics. Our most advanced theory in physics assures us the world is “really” made up of molecules. The universe presents countless collections and aggregates but all its myriad forms are molecules none-the-less. It has also found that these molecules are constructed out of approximately 100 types of atoms. In all the universe stuff only comes in approximately 100 flavors.

Now here is the interesting thing. We can study all this and using our imaginations can form pictures of it but that’s as far as it goes in most western forms of study. To contemplate is to go a step further. If you were not studying quantum mechanics due to a mild curiosity attracted to the strange but were studying it desperate to discover what reality really is, with all the weight of life and death breathing down your neck… well then you would have gone a step further. With the silent stillness of shamatha meditation to ground our investigations the process is less like fireworks then the impression I may have left with that description but the key to turning up the juice is recognizing the existential nature of what is being considered.

Most schools of meditation have a traditional series of subjects for contemplation that progressively lead towards the wisdom and compassion that is the ultimate goal. This makes it sound as simple as passing through grades in school but we’re talking about training the mind where nothing is ever quite as simple, or complex, as it seems. In the Tibetan Buddhism I study there are progressions of whole schools of philosophical thought. Progressing from one view to the next is also what is meant by training in the view.

The next cycle of posts will be about sharing the foundational view which should be quite congenial for most of my readers. It is thoroughly dualistic and materialistic just like the prevailing consensus in the modern world about what is really real. It is considered foundational because before we can appreciate some of the advanced views, say those aligned with quantum mechanics and emptiness, there first needs to be a clear and distinct picture of what is being negated.

There are a number of subtleties and fascinating implications that the contemplative’s over millennia have discovered and shared about this view which for the most part has not been given much thought in the west. There are many western voices with the same messages but they have never occupied a mainstream position in our societies. I would be honored if you let me introduce you to a few of them in the coming weeks. Meditation is learned from teachers met in the flesh. I offer my words as just one practitioner’s celebration of the opportunity to live this contemplative life and to encourage or entice others, as the case may be, on this same path. I see the role of these posts as an adjunct, not a replacement, for a basic study of Buddhism, in this case roughly the Hinayana as presented within Tibetan traditions.

Before we begin proper, however, as is typical if one is trying to stay true to the systematic nature of things, we must set the stage, provide the context, sketch out the boundaries of our inquires. First, there seems to me is the rule above all others; we are seeking the really real, the truly true, whatever existentially are the “facts” and should be willing to cast aside whatever doesn’t jive with them. Second, that said we recognize the fundamentally probabilistic nature of reasoning and accept that we will need to update our understanding of just what “facts” might be as we learn. Third, there are limits to what language can accomplish directly as a medium for communicating meaning so look for the moon and don’t get hung up on the finger pointing to it. This is important as these ideas, ultimately, stretch language and with it conceptual thought, to its breaking point. At the loftiest heights are the Madhyamika or Middle Way schools who play with reasoning to pole vault into altered states of consciousness. This reasoning thing we have been looking at runs in some fashion or another along the whole path. We will not be going to those Madhyamika peaks but it is good to know right from the start that they are there.

Another vital element of the context of the upcoming discussion is the intention. Times are tough. Not just the daily grind but the knowing that grinds at your heart, threatening joyfulness; the more you learn about ecological reality the more dismal it gets. I sincerely believe that for many people adopting a contemplative practice offers a lifeline as the cold wind blows. We are learning to be of benefit to others, training in a strength of mind that can meet these tough times head-on.

To prepare, if you want to play along, I’ll leave you with the assignment to ask in your quiet contemplative time just what is happening exactly right here and right now. Feel your way into just where does the moment of now arise and just where your experience is actually happening. Try to tease out the difference between thinking about experiences and being with experience directly.

This last week samsara-news brought word of the beheading of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians. Reasoning in such a world is a small flame. It burns bright and it cannot be extinguished. It can, however, be ignored.

The ability of humans to reason is Promethean. This is the sentence that started this series of posts exploring the human ability to reason. Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to mankind that we might find warmth and comfort in the great dark of the silent, star filled night. For his gift Prometheus was condemned to eternal torture by Zeus; forever chained to a rock while day in and day out an eagle devours his liver. The eagle with its razor sharp sight is said to feast on the organ that cleans the blood. In the twilight language of symbolism and myth this situates the classical etymology of Prometheus as “forethought” as that which is associated with life itself, for the blood is life. The ancient myth does not shy away from teaching that forethought while allowing us to see far is also that which brings suffering. Who would deny it is so among those who have studied the ongoing ecocides? Looking into the future and seeing a die-off due to the ecological ignorance of our society is quite exquisitely depressing.

The difficulty of such a fundamental shift in the assessment of one of society’s most fundamental cornerstones should not be underestimated. That careful reasoning is now delivering news about a horror filled future is fueling a resurgence in the irrational. It is not hard to sense that there is an ill wind blowing through our days of late. It is not hard to sense where the fault lines are hiding or to sense their rumblings. I am reminded of Carl Jung’s premonition of the start of WWI.

The modern world inherits many of its defining characteristics from the Age of the Enlightenment when human reasoning was held up as the road less traveled, the one trustworthy guidepost through the thickets of superstition, religious fanaticism and its accompanying endless warfare. Thinkers dared to dream of a day in which universal education would spread the light of the enlightenment across all the classes of society. The greatest artistic achievements and the loftiest philosophies were thought to soon enrich the lives of the working poor as much as they had the non-working rich. Governments would no longer be ruled by religious institutions and the vagaries of dogmatic disputes but instead would create a secular space in which all peoples could live and worship as they see fit.

All of this is such obvious history we in the west rarely take the time to appreciate the uniqueness of our inheritance. For my part the non-theist position of Buddhism respects this hard earned position. The Dali Lama has taught for years now that there is a need for a secular ethics, an ethics based in reasoning and not revelation. How hard is it really to work carefully through the ethical questions each of us are confronted with? All the religions of the world are in basic agreement about what it means to live a good human life. They teach that one should not lie, steal, kill, use reproductive urges to harm others, and to not become so intoxicated that you forget the first four. Every one of these items can be defended on the basis of human dignity without the need to have recourse to any potentially divisive religious assertions.

Where the dark impulses rule, this simple agenda of grounding an ethical life in reasonable considerations comes to seem too restrictive. In bloodlust comes the hunger to hurt others, to make them pay for the hurt you suffer, to force your will upon their flesh and gain, for a moment, a sense that you are in control. The simple ethical principles grounded in reason cannot be twisted to justify murder and mayhem, so societies the world over and throughout history have succumbed to temptations to believe those pied pipers that pipe the tune the people want to hear: you alone are sacred and special and the other threatens you: “God says kill them.”

Is this not the other face of religion? One of the many virtues of the Bible is how blatant this other face of religion is described, with a jealous and angry god exterminating one society after another. The same is found on the battlefields of the Bhagavad Gita, in the stories of the Greek’s Ares and the Roman’s Mars and of course in the tales of Mohammed and the Jihad as seen in the news last week. The history of the last century puts paid to any hope that secular movements would be protected from such deviations. The Communist gulag and the Nazi death camps made clear that these eruptions of collective psychosis do not need explicitly religious breeding grounds.

Now that we have a model for what reasoning actually is, it is possible to find a nuanced position for this uniquely powerful cognitive capacity. It is not a savior nor is it a beguiling devil in disguise. Reason is an unshakable witness to what is real and true about being human in this world, a presence deep within the body-mind of what is real and true and what is not. As has been mentioned before it is not something you can fool or force to behave as you would wish but retains a degree of autonomy. Life lives us. The full experience of the “really real” is bigger than reason alone but it does not contradict reason, which is the beauty of it.

Those ethical guidelines known the world over? Those are the teachings that naturally arise when one looks upon other life forms with compassion. Compassion is the most rational response to a completely interdependent world full of unique, impermanent yet sensate beings. Why? Because it entails what is most powerful about our experience. The most intimate knowing you have of the world will be found in the interface between your feelings and the thoughts that accompany them as they encounter the world. Assuming the same experience, with all its emotional impact, is what the person in front of you also experiences is the sign of human maturity. We call those who cannot understand others to be as legitimately conscious and sensitive as themselves psychopaths and sociopaths. They lack what cognitive science call the theory of mind; the working hypothesis that others minds are the same as one’s own. Acts of violence, in war or otherwise, all share a fundamental disregard for this ground of being.

Indulge me for a moment if you would and allow a few overly simplistic generalizations. In eastern cultures there has been a tendency to dismiss the power of reasoning a bit too easily. There is an iconoclastic bursting forth of paradoxes we find refreshing but in less skilled hands has led to tossing reason out instead of carefully laying it down before that which is bigger. Generally the eastern cultures have valued the aesthetic sense with art and ritual playing important roles; they are not hounded by the Faustian hunger to know we see characterizing western cultures. The western world has gone the other extreme and dismissed dreams, mysticisms and all other manifestations of mind except those that can be reduced to reasoning about measurable properties as without value, meaning or importance. They are without value for the workplace, without meaning for discussions among the scientific intelligentsia and without importance within our theologies.

Properly appraising the ability to reason must lie somewhere between these two extremes. This is what the model we have been discussing these last few posts helps me with. It is reason that guides us when we discover how to build a bridge that will not collapse or how washing your hands before performing surgery benefits the patient. There are countless daily tasks necessary for survival and wellbeing, each of which is made more effective and powerful due to having been carefully thought about and addressed with an artifact of ingenuity. Many of our taken for granted features of the modern environment are the result of centuries of careful reasonings that were built up generation after generation. We should appreciate just how much hard work goes into engineering. The slide rules are often unruly, the elegant algorithms lose their shine in the real code running all our devices and the tolerances for error have become so small meeting their strictures is an unending chore. To be awake to the reality of our world as it really is today needs to include this understanding so we can remain grateful for the infrastructure we enjoy and the many benefits of technology, even while we remain critical of it.

On the other hand reasoning is notoriously unable to deliver the goods when the questions being asked are about existential meaning; the ultimate purpose of the love and suffering experienced by our human nervous systems. Scientific explanations of depression do not lift depression. Scientific explanations of evolution do not comfort a bereaved widow.

For these features of our human experience the arts are more appropriate. There are reasons the heart knows that reason is not aware of, to paraphrase Pascal. The passionate embrace of lovers is captured, somewhat, in the alternating swelling and gentle breezes of musical expression, the grief of the lovers parted by death is addressed through the tragedies of the stage and screen more directly than by a research paper on molecular biology. In the beauty of form and color the sculpture’s gifts bring us a grace of understanding that reaches a place of feelings running much deeper than the calculations of reasoning – running into those places where blood is thicker than water, where the painful feasting on the liver continues.

The foresight reason grants us is couched in probability. Shrouded in uncertainty the future remains ever new. Still, we are not blind; we grope our way forward with the light of evidence. Reason allows us to be sure of something, as sure as we can be. Ask an engineer what pressure a given piece of steel can withstand and they will answer with a high degree of confidence, plus or minus a bit of course. In the world of feel-good mass entertainment and the lax, anything-goes cultural milieu it nurtures, it is important not to lose sight of this ability of careful reasoning to grant us a high degree of confidence. It aids the contemplative to maintain their individual diligence against the madness around them. It also aids cutting through the BS and the wishy-washy smoke screens deliberately created around the ecological truth of our time.

I would like to arm my readers with the ability to quickly recognize invalid inferences. Inference will be explored below but first I want to say a few words about how careful thinking is the best medicine for of our times. My working position is that we cannot deal with the problems of the day with the same thinking that created them and that the pollutions, extinctions and other abuses of our environment reflect states of cultural or inner consciousness that are equally ill.

Advertising and PR find endless ways to twist the human heart and mind into painful contortions from which they can force people to act to relieve the psychic pressure – to buy this or that. We fill our heads with non-stop lying images. These fields started as information rich attempts to persuade potential buyers by sharing the virtues of the products in question. Does that seem incredible? Take a look at this typical ad from the age that saw the birth of advertising.

It was not long before the ad men (and they were men for the most part) discovered it was much more effective to bypass the reasoning mind and directly manipulating the hopes and fears we all entertain around death, sex, status and social insecurities. This was much more effective. One thing led to another until today we are literally awash in invalid inferences.

When Subaru says its car is love and fills its commercial messages with images of young couples in non-polluted, idyllic nature scenes or warm family relations the logic involved runs something like this:

You feel bad, as you should because you do not own our car.
Here is an example of people happy with their lives because they have love in them.
You need to own our car if you want to have love in your life.

Or a politician’s campaign:

You feel bad, as you should since I am not in office.
Here’s an example of what the guy in office does wrong.
You need to vote for me if you want to feel better about your self, your country and your future.

Everywhere the first move is to create dissatisfaction, a lack of contentment with what you already experience in the real world. It is business 101 – create the need and sell it. This is why so much of what you see and hear is surreal, animated; camera tricks being used to create worlds impossible to realize in reality. They maximize the contrast with your daily experience of people, nature, emotions and social interactions. If you have a TV watch it without the sound on for a few hours. Watch with your B.S. detector well fed, rested and ready for action. What’s real?

By the way, thinking about doing the little experiment and actually doing it with the laboratory of your own nervous system are two very different things. The whole point is to reclaim the ability to have experiences for your self and not be satisfied with the canned goods being offered. Learning is by doing so the whole body-mind is involved. Living vicariously is a trap, unworthy of the opportunity we receive with one more precious day to be alive.

If you dismiss these concerns about the medium being the message with the line they taught you – ‘Oh, I know it is not real, just an entertaining fantasy’ – then you are naive about how the world really works. The for-profit companies creating these fantasies would not continue to invest billions of dollars if the product did not induce people to act as those companies desire. Reams of unpopular research over decades supports the claim that these techniques successfully manipulate public behavior.

There are a number of reasons you might want to consider developing cognitive Aikido for dealing with these things. For one, as the slow grind of social collapse continues under the weight of diminishing energy resources and increasing pollutions, fewer and fewer of us will be found in the inner circle of winners where the consumer paradise is rumored to be found. Not that the number of images of people supposedly enjoying that tin-foil paradise will lessen, far from it. Put bluntly, it is just going to drive you crazy if you believe on some level your happiness depends on purchases you cannot afford. Another good argument for learning effective counter-measures is that peace of mind and contentment strengthen the immune system. In a world where antibiotics and healthcare systems increasingly fail to deliver it could be having inner contentment is our most practical avenue to a long and healthy life, at least for those of us outside of the charmed circle. The final reason I will ask you to consider is simply what affect your life will have on others. Everywhere in hyper-capitalism’s twilight people are over-worked and under-appreciated. Simple common courtesy is not common, the happy-to-be-alive radiance once seen on people’s faces has all but disappeared and the crushing burden of our secular guilt due to our ongoing participation in ecocide have cast a darkness over the developed world which no one fully escapes. Use this cognitive Aikido to fight back and not only will you become less susceptible to those who would manipulate your most intimate being, but you just might become the glimmer of light that those around you need to get through their day without becoming monsters.

Without further ado on to another excerpt from my project.

Non-Bayesian statistics and probability has mostly been a study of how chance and randomness affect events. In this approach it makes sense to talk about the probability that event X will occur but it does not make sense to talk about the probability of a proposition. Bayesian thought is nothing less than a reconsideration of these fundamental definitions. It finds that probability encompasses statistics once it is given a proper theoretical foundation. This new foundation builds on the use of probability as a guide to reasoning under uncertain evidence. It is easy to spell out the differences by quickly reviewing the basics of logic. Here we come to the heart of the matter of this Bayesian conceptual revolution. Logic as expressed in the predicate calculus is highly technical. This presentation is only as technical as needed to share a sense of the conceptual coherence this alternative view of probability provides.

Here are the classic formations of proper deductive logic side by side with a typical application. These diagrams follow the standard logical presentation in which a line separates the premises of the argument from the conclusion; the line represents “therefore”.

These illustrate the extent to which proper deductive conclusions can be drawn. Each alternative not listed leads to logical fallacies if the scope of logic remains deductive. A is referred to as the antecedent, B as the consequence. Each can be assigned what is referred to as a truth value. In deductive logic the only truth values allowed are true and false and so we talk of valid and invalid arguments. If one attempts to reason that B is true therefore A is true one commits the logical fallacy of affirming the consequence. For example if Bob did not study then he fails the test – he failed the test – therefore Bob did not study. It is easy to see that this incorrectly removes all the other reasons for which Bob may not have passed the test; he simply couldn’t understand the material, was too ill to attend class on the day of the test, etc.

If one tries to reason by drawing a conclusion from A being false therefore B is false one commits the logical fallacy of denying the antecedent. Staying with Bob such invalid reasoning runs along these lines; if Bob studied then he will pass the test – he did not study – therefore he did not pass the test. Again it is easy to see that this does not take into account all the other possible reasons Bob might have been able to pass the test; he had already learned the material, cheated, got lucky, etc.

Here is the rub. These very fallacies are often the only form of reasoning available for considering questions in the real world. We humans confront them multiple times a day. A weaker form of syllogism is possible if one extends the scope of the possible truth values from only true and false being allowed so that they are able to take on a range of probabilities. Now instead of logical fallacies it becomes a question of correctly reasoning about uncertainties, inductive logic. We say an inductive argument is weak or strong.

Notice that these are entirely logical connections. The relationship illustrated in the weaker syllogisms is not in the direction of cause and effect; it does not assert that because there are clouds there will be rain, after all many times in the past it has been cloudy but has not rained. Instead the direction is one of logic; it asserts that if there is rain then there must also be clouds. If it is 9 am and one is trying to decide to take an umbrella or not the state of the sky and past experience are the evidence one has on which to form a conclusion. You form a prediction, one of many you will attempt throughout the day. To make the prediction you weigh the evidence, you inductively consider just how cloudy is it, how dark are the clouds, what way is the wind blowing, and what did they forecast on the news last night?

This extension to plausible inference was examined by G. Polya in ‘Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning’ (1954) particularly volume two subtitled appropriately ‘Patterns of Plausible Inference.’ Here the weak syllogisms are taken one more step where they are shown to explain other typical characteristics of inferences. We all seem to intuitively understand “the verification of certain consequences strengthens our belief more and that of others strengthens it less” (Polya pg. 6). We also operate as if further substantiating evidence increases plausibility though sometimes the new evidence affects the strength of weakness of our conclusions considerably and sometimes only slightly.

There are many more forms of logical patterns in both inductive and deductive logic. There are patterns for dealing with propositions that are incompatible with each other and patterns for adding the quantifiers “some” and “all” to the propositions. These few provide sufficient illustration for our purposes. It is reassuring that the extension of logic by using plausibility agrees with our common sense notions but is there anything more substantial to bring in their defense? Indeed there is. The physicist Richard Cox was able to derive the laws of probability from a set of postulates that justifies the logical interpretation of probability. He does so using Boolean algebra. Regular algebra deals with quantities; Boolean algebra deals with propositions. Boolean algebra defines operators on which today’s computers rely, for example, the logical operations indicated by AND, OR, NOT. In “The Algebra of Probable Inference” (Cox 1961) Cox derives probability theory from an extension of Boolean algebra and in so doing proves it is the only theory of inductive reasoning that maintains logical consistency. It is said that Cox returned probability theory to its original 18th century roots as formalized by Laplace. He does this by proving probability theory to be the axioms of logic when logic deals with uncertainty. In the 1950s this approach was considered too subjective to be used in science and engineering so the alternative foundation of probability theory in the frequentist school was developed. Cox’s brilliant achievement was to show that the original logical foundation was in fact the most coherent. The Cox Theorem has provided a rigorous mathematical mapping of inductive logic to probability theory. It is a fundamental intellectual achievement.

One, I might add, that I believe deserves to be shepherded through the coming societal upheavals.

Oh, and Subaru is not love, it is a car. One of an estimated 900 million that are currently running around on our planet, eating our future alive. They are saying there will be over two billion light vehicles on the road by 2050. Really? Inference is how we are able to think about the future. Right now there is no more important ethical and practical question to be asking. Like it or not the ecological evidence is overwhelmingly telling us the coming generations will suffer under some catastrophic tipping point or another. That is the most probable outcome. Business as usual will not continue and whatever comes next will be cleaning up or avoiding the toxic results of our actions for centuries. Time to wake up and smell the burnt toast, anyone noticed any strange weather here in the U.S. of late? Two billion cars by 2050 is, to put it as politely as I can, crazy talk.

The data matters, that the prior convictions are reasonable matters, that we understand the best we can do is sketch a probability curve of what is most likely matters. It is the truth of the strength of human knowledge. Epistemologically these three curves will meld and mold each other into a most probable outcome, the result of our careful reasoning. Carrying the weight of our best understanding we are ethically obligated to act as if it is the truth, even though our result is also a curve and will meet new data and evolve through another cycle.

The point of all this is this: the data that has been gathered in the last few years concerning the severity of the ecological crises has exceed what was expected by most of our models, sometimes considerably. Some of the weather events outside your door were not expected for another decade or more. The models are being recalibratedbut it should be common knowledge that in the conservative IPCC reports of 2007 the worst scenarios are the ones the historic data matched. It should be common knowledge that the same historic trend lines matching the worst scenarios modeled is also the case for the Limits to Growth studies. All of these are saying that what we are doing now is almost certainly stealing our ease at the cost of massive suffering by people just like us who happen to be born in the future instead of now. Or, as a Buddhist I cannot help but wonder, might those future beings be us in some way, paying the piper as cause and effect work their way down the deep time centuries of DNA time? Either way the here and now is real, precious and threatened.

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away”.How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later, Philip K. Dick

Last week’s cliff hanger flashed Bayes Theorem and today we are going to put it through its paces. I’m repeating the same equation here in words( | is the symbol for given, ∝ is the symbol for is proportional to):

Remember the point of the equation is to weigh a belief in light of some new data. This new degree of belief in the hypothesis is called the posterior probability, what we have as a result of the operations. The operations ask how likely is this data given our belief and just how probable is that belief anyway? The second form normalizes the numbers by dividing by the evidence so that the distributions that they represent sum to 1.

The posterior then becomes your prior degree of belief the next time new data confronts your hypothesis. Iterating the process, chaining the equation to itself this way, is one way of modeling the human reasoning process. An example pertinent to the concerns of this blog: I believe anthropomorphic climate change is really real.

The process I went through to arrive at this conclusion went something along these lines. First being open-minded I had no idea what to believe, nothing that would satisfy my most critical searches for evidence justifying a position one way or the other. I do know the earth is warming, a trend both sides mostly agree on. I understand how green house gas physics is a part of what has allowed the biosphere to flourish for billions of years and how changes in its composition are linked to changes in temperature throughout geological periods. These are some of the relevant prior understandings I am bringing to the question. I do not know what to make of the claim that human activity is having a significant effect on these gases. This is the state of maximum entropy in the lingo of Bayes. Then I study the data about the melting ice caps; say a dozen peer reviewed articles, handful of books, a couple of documentaries, and plenty of photographic evidence. The majority of the evidence is arguing that the rate of melting is accelerating because the contributions of industrial gases are a statistically significant factor. Now my honest sense of what is real finds veracity in the claim that climate change is related to human activity. Say I became 70% convinced; there is probably something to the claim that anthropomorphic climate change is really real. Now when I turn to the study of ocean acidification I bring my previously reasoned position with me. As the process of my study continued through all the types of data available and how the models built of the data are constructed and interpreted eventually the claim worked its way into that inner bucket of “this is real.”

Much money is spent and enormous efforts are applied to the public conversations around climate change to present the public with the impression that either side might be right. A concerted effort by those with much to lose has created the impression that the question is 50 / 50; maybe yes, maybe no. Big oil and their bought talking-heads in congress and on TV would like to say to our children’s generation – “I’ll flip you for it.” A more indefensible position is hard to imagine. The circumstances are complex enough to rule out any simple black and white conclusions – yes, human activity is causing all climate change or no, human activity has absolutely nothing to do with climate change. This is not a situation in which a binary choice applies as if flipping a coin. We will look at flipping a coin in just a moment to draw the contrast in as stark of terms as I am capable of.

If we are going to find any peace of mind we are going to need to learn to think straight and one of the indispensable skills that requires is fine tuning our B.S. detectors.

Now to debate my position is always welcome. Intellectual honesty and integrity lay down a simple rule: bring me data and / or an alternative hypothesis that will convince me otherwise. There is a place for poetics, rhetoric, spin and color. This is not that place. This is reasoning and it is being applied to life and death questions. As we are all in this together I think we must agree that reason is the only reliable guide we seem to have access to as owners of a finite understanding embedded in the universe we are reasoning about. Remember that bit about being able to measure also providing access to the only objectivity we can claim? It is the same type of thing here. You can assert without further evidence that a man in the clouds or a deceased uncle told you the claim was a lie, but I can hardly be slighted for dismissing you as not sufficiently serious given the stakes. You can bring out data but on this question the overwhelming majority in every relevant field is against you. Going against the objectivity of the majority is indeed your prerogative, after all, absolutes are off the table and how else will the paradigms change? Still, to assert your position is anything but one of the inhabitants of cranksville, that would simply be dishonest. What my mother would call a lie.

So far I have just pulled percentages out of the air in my examples. The actual process is hardly so arbitrary; in fact it is in the transparency of the reasoning mechanic that the great strength of Bayesian work shines. It is why science is using it in more and more of its modeling, why spy agencies have been using it for ages and those building models of the brain find it central to their work. If you want to join the fun and games I’d like to mention and thank Mr. Kruschke for his fine guide, Doing Bayesian Data Analysis.

What follows is an excerpt from a project around Bayesian thought. It is offered to convey some sense of the processes.

There are two main characteristics of probability distributions to keep in mind: the area under the curve always sums to 1 and the shapes of the curves shift to where the bulk of the probability is to be found. Using various shapes allows us to express our degrees of belief be they small, large or indifferent. This illustration uses the Beta distribution as a convenient way to express degrees of beliefs though there are many others and there is no mathematical requirement for the prior to be expressible as a function at all. As long as the curve’s area sums to one, any conceivable shape can be drawn point by point using a grid approach. Let’s return to our investigation of that strange animal in our distribution jungle, the prior. It combines with the data in the likelihood, the crucible of the equation where their interaction results in an updated belief. For the likelihood in what follows a binomial distribution is used to model a binary outcome. We will graphically explore what happens as a prior encounters data that comes in all shapes and sizes. Some data we encounter is expected while other data catches us by surprise.

A friend has given you a shiny half dollar for your birthday. He assures you that this is a very special coin and encourages you to flip it to see if it comes up heads or tails. You look it over carefully but see nothing amiss so you expect the chance of the coin coming up heads to be about 50 – 50. You give the coin a good flip and it lands tails. Three more flips all come up tails too. You notice a mischievous smirk on your friends face but throwing caution to the wind flip the coin a fourth time and now it lands heads up. Five more tosses all come up tails. “I’ll bet you $50 the next flip comes up tails” your friend offers. Taken aback you begin to ask yourself just exactly how much you believe that this is indeed a fair half dollar.

I will not keep you in suspense. The coin was purchased at a magic shop where the dealer assured your friend that it was specially manufactured with a bias for landing tail side up. Let’s see how a Bayesian model deals with this situation. A fair coin can be modeled as having a 0.5 bias, meaning it has an equal chance of coming up heads or tails. Because your friend is smart enough not to believe magicians, he tried the coin out in the store before the purchase. This being a magic store his prior belief about the fairness of the coin was completely uncommitted, far as he was concerned it might have any bias at all. In the graph below this uncommitted prior belief is modeled as a Beta(1,1) distribution, a straight line covering an area summing to 1 illustrating all outcomes are considered equally likely. The likelihood below the prior shows your friend flipped the coin ten times in the magic store and only once did it come up heads. The posterior in the lowermost panel mirrors the likelihood, the Beta(1,1) prior having no affect. In the bottom panel the bias for heads is shown as .1. The center of the distribution peak convinced your friend the coin had bias that would cause it to land heads up only one tenth of the time. The deal with the proprietor of the magic store was consummated and now here you are wondering about the innocence of the very same coin.

This is not the first coin you have ever seen, you’ve been around the block. You consider that of all the coins you have encountered they seemed to flip fair, maybe not perfectly unbiased but for the most part trustable enough to decide which football team should go first. You have a prior with most of the area around 0.5 but are willing to account for some variations. The Beta(2,2) distribution used below expresses this nicely. The first column of graphs show how your prior belief in a distribution centered about 0.5 would change to one closer to 0.2 if you also flipped the coin ten times and observed heads only once. Notice that the prior has had its influence; you are not willing to grant the bias is one tenth on just ten observations. So far in our story you have actually flipped the coin nine times, do you take the bet? Just how many tosses would it take to overcome the effect of your prior expectation so that you also arrive at the correct estimate of the bias centered at one tenth? The second column shows it would take about 180 throws. You could be playing with your new birthday present a long time.

What if your prior conviction of the fairness of the coin was even stronger? You reason that half dollars are minted by the U.S. government according to strict specifications. Every coin may not be exactly 100% unbiased but surely if there is a bit of bias it is small. A Beta(10,10) prior captures your considerations and the graphs below tell the story. Even with only one head showing up in ten tosses the resulting degree of belief in this half dollar’s bias against heads is only about 0.35. You still expect to see three or four heads in ten throws. Lucky for you, though you trust the government mints you long ago learned your friend can be sneaky. You decline the bet and go off to dinner together, paying dutch. This is a fairytale ending, a very good thing. How many more throws would it have taken to bring your posterior belief around to one tenth when starting with this stronger prior? A whopping 1,600 throws, you could still be flipping that half dollar next year when your friend came over to give you a deck of cards for your birthday…

I hope this illustrated how the data matters. Honest interpretations of it are possible because of the different understandings each of us develops over the course of our life experiences and studies. What will convince one person will not necessarily convince another and not just because they are refusing to reason with care. All this is captured in this simple example of the Bayesian explanation of reasoning but it is impossible to miss the larger implications; given sufficient evidence all people, regardless of their prior convictions, will tend towards the same inescapably probabilistic conclusions.

This sort of reasoning is a public affair. It is the Lingua Franca of social conversations that are involved with contingency planning, risk analysis and a whole host of other critical processes. The transparency of assigning probability allows us to evaluate each others positions. It is an adult form of conversation for adult issues that will directly affect the degree of suffering occurring in our world.

These posts take up subjects in small sequences. For most readers starting at the beginning of a cycle and reading them in order is recommended. The subjects covered can be accessed using the subject categories found below.

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